In modern e-commerce, flexibility and personalization are key to delivering a seamless customer experience. One way to enhance the SuiteCommerce Advanced (SCA) checkout process is by integrating a custom date selector—a simple yet powerful feature that allows customers to specify important dates relevant to their orders. These dates could represent a wide range of scenarios: a delivery or shipping date, a preferred pickup day, a subscription start date, or any other date-based input specific to business needs.
To illustrate this, consider the example of allowing customers to choose a preferred delivery date during checkout. This capability provides clarity and convenience to the customer while giving the business valuable information for planning fulfillment. The selected date can be stored directly on the sales order, ensuring it becomes part of the order processing workflow in NetSuite. Implementing this functionality in SCA involves creating a custom module that adds a date input field to one or more steps of the checkout wizard.
The core implementation begins with a simple template that renders a native HTML5 date picker:
<input
type="date"
id="selectedDate"
name="selectedDate"
value="{{newDate}}"
required
/>
{{#if shipDateErrorMessage}}
<div class="error-message">{{shipDateErrorMessage}}</div>
{{/if}}
In the view file, a custom Backbone module extends Wizard.Module and integrates the selected date into the order model. It also uses localStorage to preserve the date across steps and writes the final value into a NetSuite field via the Cart component:
initialize: _.wrap(WizardModule.prototype.initialize, function (fn) {
fn.apply(this, _.toArray(arguments).slice(1));
var options = this.model.get('options');
const savedDate = localStorage.getItem('ShipDateBilling');
if (savedDate) {
options.custbody_jj_req_ship_date = savedDate;
this.model.set('options', options);
}
SC.Application.getComponent('Cart').setTransactionBodyField({
fieldId: 'custbody_jj_req_ship_date',
type: 'date',
value: options.custbody_jj_req_ship_date
});
})
To enhance the user experience, a basic validation method can be implemented to restrict certain dates—such as weekends, past dates, or known holidays. Here’s a small example of how a validation function might look:
validateDate: function () {
const input = document.getElementById('selectedDate').value;
const selected = new Date(input);
const today = new Date();
if (selected < today || selected.getDay() === 0 || selected.getDay() === 6) {
this.shipDateErrorMessage = 'Please select a valid weekday in the future.';
this.render();
return;
}
this.shipDateErrorMessage = '';
this.render();
}
This function can be triggered on change or before submission to prevent invalid selections. More complex rules—like holiday blackouts or region-based restrictions—can also be integrated if required.
Finally, the getcontext method returns the necessary data to the template:
getContext: function () {
const selectedDate = this.model.get('options').custbody_jj_req_ship_date || '';
return {
newDate: selectedDate,
shipDateErrorMessage: this.shipDateErrorMessage
};
}
Although this example uses a delivery date, the same approach can be reused for any scenario that requires a user to select a date. Additional logic—such as disabling past dates, excluding weekends, or integrating blackout periods—can be added as needed to meet specific business requirements. Because the customization is modular and built using standard SCA development practices, it remains easy to maintain and scale.
In conclusion, adding a custom date selector to the SuiteCommerce Advanced checkout process offers significant flexibility for both customers and businesses. Whether it’s capturing delivery preferences, appointment times, or any other date-based input, this enhancement strengthens the order capture process while maintaining a seamless user experience. By leveraging SCA’s extensibility model, developers can implement this feature in a clean, reusable, and future-proof way.